The Rapid City Police Department has identified at least one person who is accused of harassing grade-school students

President Tom Helland has said guests in the company’s suite exhibited poor behavior

Hopefully the police ensure that all of the guests identified by Tom Helland are charged with assault, hate crimes and child abuse. Then they should be forced to publicly apologise and in addition to any fines and jail time, work some kind of community service in the reservation.

I’m not totally surprised. I was in Minnesota near Duluth and my wife, who works for the Dept of Labor, was investigating a company owned by Native Americans. I guess when they found out that I was Potawatomie they warmed up to her greatly. Evidently they get a lot of bullshit in what I though was a pretty laid back area.

I’m sad to say that at first glance I assumed this was a Canadian story (Obviously my mind was translating “Native American” into “Indigenous North American” on my behalf - stupid brain). Aboriginals being abused at a hockey game would be a quintessentially Canadian experience.

But seriously, racist insults at young children? I hope that this was genuinely illegal and that someone gets charged. I know America has strong free speech laws, but you actually don’t need to protect people who hurl racist abuse at kids in order to protect people who are critical of the government or of society.

It’s not just your state. I live in Upstate NY and I’ll never forget the first time I heard the term Prairie Nigger. I have a lot of friends in the south and spend a lot of time explaining to them how often I see and hear things stereotypically put on them. Ignorance and hubris are everywhere in this country.

This is a thing? Canada seems to be forever slipping further into the shadows from my pov. Was thinking of emigrating there at one time.

Well, I wouldn’t say that in itself is a big thing (it certainly happens), it’s more just that hockey is so Canadian and mistreating aboriginals is so Canadian. Unfortunately, the stats on being aboriginal in Canada are actually more appalling than the stats on being black in America - even more disproportionate incarceration rate, higher child poverty, so many women “disappear” (rather than “are killed” - aboriginal woman in Canada :: black man in America), and so on.

Canada definitely has some things going for it over America. Canada is way less of a police state. It may have even more things going for it after the next Federal election (the leading party is running on legalizing pot!). But of course it also varies regionally, just like America (not as much because provinces aren’t as independent as states). Toronto is the world’s example of functional multi-culturalism and in a lot of ways it really lives up to that (e.g., mixed race couples among teenagers are so common that it almost looks like Toronto teenager literally don’t take race into account at all) but black and aboriginal people are still overwhelmingly the target of police interest.

Other places are a little more familiarly regressive. You can’t get an abortion in PEI (although that province is more akin to a small town than a state). Manitoba’s child poverty rate for aboriginal children is 62% - earning Manitoba aboriginals the distinction of being essentially the most marginalized group in any first world nation (the province’s capital was recently named “the most racist city in Canada”). BC is pretty progressive on drugs but their government legislates an end to every strike it sees reflexively.

I think I’d rather be in Canada than in America for a number of reasons, and in Toronto specifically, but we aren’t exactly in the promised land up here.

There seems to always be a problem with racism towards Aboriginals in countries a majority of whites have colonised.

The implicit denial of repressed acknowledgement of racism in the cultures of Australia and America were known to me but I kind of expected Canada to be, well… more enlightened. Somehow.

Out and out racists are easy to deal with. Otherwise decent people who have unknowingly absorbed the culture of racism but have found it possible, because of social convention and peer pressure, to think of themselves as anything but racist really trouble me. <damn s!>

The implicit denial of repressed acknowledgement of racism in the cultures of Australia and America were known to me but I kind of expected Canada to be, well… more enlightened. Somehow.

Yeah, Canada has an unearned reputation of being nice. Well, I guess we are kind of nice, just not to aboriginal people. With aboriginal people we basically beat out every other country in our systemic racism (even if, in many places, the majority of people would be disgusted by overt racism).

miasm:

There seems to always be a problem with racism towards Aboriginals in countries a majority of whites have colonised.

Not language policing, but I thought you’d be interested: “aboriginal” is mostly a Canadian word which collectively refers to various Canadian indigenous people, like “Native American” for indigenous people in the US. “Indigenous” is the term generally used internationally to refer to indigenous people all over the world.

But I think @jlw’s point was that Aboriginal brings to mind Aboriginal Australians, not First Nations/Inuit Canadians - certainly that’s true for me, and I’d suspect most Brits (and presumably Australians )

As I mention above, I thought the preferred term in Canada was First Nations.